Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer (Staff)

Role overview

You’ll be a senior technical leader and hands-on contributor responsible for the architecture, scalability, reliability, and engineering standards of Captura’s Yearbook product suite. The suite includes SSY (Heroku) and Memento (AWS) and is built primarily with Vue.js and Node.js. You’ll partner with Product, Platform, Security, SRE, and Engineering leadership to modernize systems and drive major technical initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Technical leadership & architecture

  • Lead architecture and implementation of complex frontend and backend systems across the Yearbook suite
  • Set technical direction for Vue.js, Node.js, APIs, integrations, and data models
  • Define and promote engineering standards, architectural patterns, and development best practices
  • Create RFCs, technical designs, and implementation plans for major initiatives
  • Evaluate and adopt technologies/tooling to improve scalability, maintainability, and developer productivity
  • Consolidate shared capabilities and improve cross-product platform consistency

• Application development & scalability

  • Build performant, reliable applications for photographers, schools, studios, and consumers
  • Design scalable services and APIs for workflows, ordering, fulfillment, and image-heavy operations
  • Improve performance for large datasets, high-traffic workflows, and seasonal traffic spikes
  • Modernize legacy systems through incremental improvements
  • Ensure reliable operation across Heroku and AWS environments
  • Partner with Platform and SRE on deployment, observability, and operational readiness

• Engineering excellence & reliability

  • Drive code quality, testing, documentation, and code review standards
  • Improve CI/CD, developer tooling, local development workflows, and onboarding
  • Lead initiatives to reduce technical debt and improve maintainability
  • Advance testing strategies across unit, integration, end-to-end, and contract testing
  • Champion accessibility, security, performance, and operational excellence
  • Lead production incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-mortems
  • Improve SLIs/SLOs, monitoring, alerting, and on-call practices

• Security & compliance

  • Apply secure design and development practices across frontend, backend, and infrastructure
  • Partner on threat modeling, vulnerability remediation, and dependency management
  • Support compliance needs including SOC 2, GDPR, PCI DSS, and student-data privacy standards
  • Ensure secure handling of authentication, payments, and sensitive/PII customer data

• Mentorship & cross-functional collaboration

  • Mentor engineers via technical guidance, code reviews, architecture discussions, and knowledge sharing
  • Collaborate with Product, Platform, Security, and SRE to align technical direction and delivery priorities
  • Communicate technical concepts effectively to stakeholders

Requirements / qualifications

• Demonstrated experience leading architecture and engineering standards across complex frontend and backend systems
• Strong hands-on skills in Vue.js and Node.js (including APIs, integrations, and data modeling)
• Proven ability to improve reliability, testing practices, CI/CD, and developer productivity
• Experience supporting operational excellence (observability, incident response, SLIs/SLOs)
• Ability to apply security practices and support compliance requirements (e.g., SOC 2, GDPR, PCI DSS)

Nice-to-haves

• Experience modernizing legacy systems incrementally across multiple environments (e.g., Heroku and AWS)
• Experience with accessibility, performance, and image/data-heavy workloads